Under capitalism, a lot of the time, highly dangerous jobs are also highly paid. Kind of a balance that the individual decides to engage with. Same idea behind getting an advanced degree in STEM or law. I think of my job by example, I’m a power plant operator at a large combined cycle plant. No fucking shot I’d be doing this if the pay wasn’t good. I’m around explosive and deadly hot shit all day.
Let me try this in levels.
Under the transitionary phase between capitalism and communism, there is still currency/money, there is still commodity production, there are still bank accounts. So, for things that society needs but people are less willing to do, the answer is compensation. Communist parties have always compensated people for their work, yes even prison laborers, and for the work that fewer people are qualified for or fewer people desire to do, that compensation is increased to create incentives.
When we reduce that to simplest form, the answer is incentives.
Before capitalism, people still did dangerous work and difficult work. They didn’t do it because they were going to get rich (they weren’t), they did it because the consequences of not doing it were dire.
In feudal and slave societies, this is because the consequences, though they might be social, we’re personalized by the oppression of lords and masters. Lords and masters beat, tortured, and killed serfs and slaves to incentivize them to do dangerous and difficult work.
But what about before those societies? In nomadic societies, people did difficult and dangerous work because it needed to be done, and the consequences of not doing it were felt by the whole tribe. People weren’t tortured and murdered to incentivize them to do the dangerous work. In fact, people got together and tried to make the dangerous work less dangerous.
Reducing those things down, we have an understanding of what “difficult and dangerous” work really is - socially necessary work.
We also understand how it can be solved without incentives - socially collaborative problem solving.
So, in the transition between capitalism and communism, we still incentives and we still have socially necessary work.
Why do we call it a transitionary period? What is happening to make a transition?
The transitionary period is the period of socially collaborative problem solving to make socially necessary work both less voluminous and less risky (which includes risk of harm as well as risk of understaffing and risk of knowledge loss). No one knows that communism looks like yet. But we know what contemporary experiments exist in reducing the volume and risk of socially necessary labor - robotics, real-time systems monitoring and feedback, new construction methods, new chemical science, new applications of physics, etc.
As it turns out, sedentary lifestyles are also incredibly dangerous and lead to huge numbers of premature deaths. So it’s unlikely that communism will go the same direction capitalism seems to go, with huge numbers of people sitting in office chairs or couches for decades on end.
Your theory is very pretty and seducing. According to my relatives who lived in 2 different communist countries during the war, there is no incentive to do anything and most people sat on their asses because nothing makes a difference. And that’s why they escaped this communist heaven you mention (escaped, because you don’t leave communism without having problems).
Thanks for the laugh.
Last but not least, in communist countries you have to put locks everywhere, especially in the kitchen, because your neighbors will steal your food. But I guess it’s not mentioned in your book “Communism for Dummies.”
I don’t know anything about anything. But in those two different countries, had that transition period happened that they mentioned?
There have been no countries in the modern era that have made it communism. Every communist party in the world is starting from a non-communist starting point in a world where capitalism is the dominant economic form that shapes everything. Name any Communist country and you’ll be naming a country led by a Communist Party.
A communist party is a party that sets building communism as their goal. The process of building communism has never been complicated to date. The first experiment large scale experiment in building communism was the USSR. They lasted 70 years. Many would say they stopped even attempting to build communism around year 50 or 60.
That was a shocking amount of writing that didn’t really say anything.
Edit~ sorry for being a dick
Read closer. It said:
we don’t know the exact forms and processes that communism will take as it is still being built for the first time in modern history
during the transitionary phase, which all communist countries you can name are in and no country has ever yet left, incentives are and have been compensation, meaning money
prior incentives from pre-capitalist societies were violence
prior incentives from primitive societies were the outcomes of doing the work
without monetary incentives, primitive societies didn’t wonder about how to incentivize people to do dangerous work, they wondered about how to make dangerous work less dangerous
as communism is built from capitalism, compensation is the incentive that will be used while society also works on reducing the need for incentives by making dangerous work less dangerous or making it obsolete. A communist society will be one where the incentives are sufficient to get the work done without being so large that they create an upper class of rich people
I also should have said the richest among us under capitalism have never done dangerous work and that people who do dangerous work rarely become capital owners anyway.
There is nothing contradictory about people who do more difficult or dangerous getting special privileges (which is all extra salary really amounts to) under communism.
I will read and respond to this properly by adding an edit to this comment. Im busy at the moment but I do want to genuinely thank you for putting the amount of time and effort into your answers in this thread. I know I’m answering in a kind of snarky way to most comments. Don’t take the snark as disdain for you, just a skeptical and generally snarky guy.
Edit~ thank you for the response and all the time you took crafting it. What I understand from your response is essentially the following. We do not necessarily know what compensation for less appealing/dangerous/years of specialization jobs will look like. However, it’s likely there will likely be a quantifiable difference in quality of life. I accept that answer as its the most reasonable I’ve seen in this thread. The people saying things like “some people just enjoy a hard days work” still infuriate me though…
Yeah. I opened the comments because I was genuinely interested in how communism tackles this and was kind of looking forward to a thought-provoking answer. The above just kind of dances around the question entirely. I especially loved this line:
Gives me major “trust me bro” energy. Kind of reminds me of the religion I was in as a kid where every difficult question was answered with “no one fully understands God, you just have to have faith”.
I posed the question because I’m not a communist, but, I’ve also not looked into it very much. I’m not fully in support of whatever the fuck is happening right now. So I figure, maybe some good answers will help me grasp why so many people recommend communism. Turns out its kind of a cliche question, yet, nobody seems to have an answer. Wild to me, personally, to advocate for something so world shifting without clear answers to massive questions like this. I love the comments that are just like “well some people just really like to work hard” alright, I’m not betting society on the hope some people are willing to work a 10× harder/more dangerous job for the same level of benefit.